I’m sure this has been asked and answered before here, but it’s amazing how hard it is to focus a search on diarrhea.
So, let’s say I have dinner; something really rich and creamy or otherwise unsettling. A half hour after, maybe, my stomach starts to churn, and I have to head to the bathroom.
Diarrhea ensues. Liquid poop. Now, my question is, what exactly does this represent? Is it the breakfast I had that morning? Is it the guilty dinner? It seems that 1/2 hour is an awfuly short time for food to make it through the digestive track.
It takes anywhere from 10 to 24 hours for food to pass through the entire digestive system.* First the food moves slowly through the small intestine to ensure that all possible nutrients are removed, i.e.digested and absorbed through the cell walls. Then the remaining mass moves slowly through the large intestine to remove all the water, so that the body is properly hydrated and so the feces is firm when it is expelled.
There are a million possible reasons for this process to get disrupted. When the signal to evacuate is sent too early, the undigested material probably has not had time to be properly dehydrated and comes out watery. This mass is likely a mixture of foods from previous meals, not a reliable marker to a particular food eaten or time of meal.
And yes, we’ve answered this many times before.
*Times are approximate, depend on the individual’s physiology, any possible intestinal diseases or syndromes, and the amount, type, and frequency of food eaten. IOW, generalizations are tough.
For me, foods rich in oils or saturated fats have the same unpleasant effect on my digestion system.
Actually, it’s more like I have a saturated fat tolerance level. If I allow my body to accumulate enough fats too quickly, thar she blows. But if I went on a proper diet, I never reach that point, because my body can handle the level of intake and dispose of the fats at a more normal, and comfortable, rate.
But to answer the OP’s question more directly, I think that in my case, there may be a trace of those fats that I just injested coming out 30 minutes later, but the majority of the mess is older meals.
Is there any positive effect of this auto pooping after a dodgy meal? As it isn’t getting rid of any of the stuff you just ingested and is only getting rid of earlier and most likely safe food?
Well, anecdotely, when you eat something that has “gone bad” and get food poisoning, it can happen fairly quickly. (And the stuff comes out both ends, in that case.)
In my case, the fatty foods I ate aren’t poison, and they ain’t the most benign foods either, but somewhere in between, and my body reacted to the meal I just had.
If I had eaten something about as safe and bland as possible (say, plain bagels), I would not have had my “gut attack”.
There must be, or your body would not have developed that process in the first place.
For example, an urban legend that gets passed around here is that seagulls can’t burp. Feed them alca-seltzer, and they die. Assuming that seagulls can’t burp, it’s because they never needed to develope the ability to do so (at least, until boys with alka-seltzer appeared).
But anyway, if my body has taken the trouble to develope the ability to react in such a manner to food I ate, then I am gonna assume that it serves a purpose vis-a-vis the food I just ate…
A reasonable assumption, unless the reaction is a legacy from earlier evolution. Maybe a monkey or lemur could evacuate it’s entire digestive system in one go, which would be helpful if something detected as potentially bad had been ingested. There may have been insufficient evolutionary pressure to lose this reaction even if it was no longer useful.
Sure, normally it takes at least an hour, but normally most people don’t get the runs right after a meal either. Apparently if the digestive tract is irritated, “peristaltic rush” can be triggered and the contents of the entire small intestine emptied into the colon in just a matter of minutes. Presumably, the stomach can move food out faster as well if it “decides” to and since fats are handled further down the pipe an especially fatty meal might cause it to.
Yeah, I can read that first link off of Google too.
However, I need a firm cite to believe that fats are one of the “harmful irritants” that can trigger a “peristaltic rush”. Nor is fat something that one is allergic to.
Even if I could believe that fat content of a meal could trigger a “peristaltic rush” that doesn’t change the time factor of the stomach. Unless you are drinking pure liquids, food does not move through the stomach quickly enough to arrive at the small intestine, irritate it, trigger a “peristaltic rush” and evacuate the colon within a half-hour. Whatever is coming out is food from previous meals.
I checked PubMed for cites on “peristaltic rush” and came up with nothing usable. If you have a cite on this from a journal I need to see it. Otherwise I see nothing to contradict the standard notions of the etiology of diarrhea.
Yes, food doesn’t normally exit the stomach that quickly, but don’t you think it is possible that it could? The only thing preventing it is the pyloric sphincter and involuntary muscles do misbehave on occasion.
Since you know how to use google, feel free to try “rapid gastric emptying” . Granted its a disorder, but goes to show that at least one hour in the stomach is not a hard and fast rule.
Since I went through testing for rapid gastric emptying I happen to know a lot about it. And I’ve spent more than 20 years studying the digestive tract for personal reasons.
That’s how I know that finding a one-sentence reference to a term doesn’t mean much unless you understand the digestive system and its workings very well. You can quote the Internet to give a short definition of something you already know, but it works very badly to provide the context and understanding of systems.
There are as many reasons for diarrhea as there are stars on the MGM lot, but unless you have a syndrome that gives you constant, chronic, repeatable symptoms or known damage to the physical tract, the waste that comes out of you half an hour after you eat is from old stuff. I can’t say it is never something from your current meal, but the odds are tremendously against it.
As I said before, please give me a cite from a medical journal rather than trying to google terms you don’t understand.
Anecdotally I can tell you that I’ve eaten a big plate of sushi that didn’t agree with me, and in less than 2 hours had fishy smelling diarrhea. That’s with nothing else in my system to account for the smell, and usually I tolerate sushi just fine.
Oh I feel your pain, most foods upset my tummy especially when I have eaten too much greasy food. Japanese food is a killer approx 4 mins after finishing my dinner at the restaurant I am in the toilet with water like diarrhea, or hot wings from kfc they are also a no no for me and this sucks because I love japanese food and hot wings.
Exapno Mapcase was wrong, it can take six years to pass through to your colon. Or factually, s/he probably found the thread on Google and joined. Welcome, hulsey. Reopening old threads is sometimes frowned upon, but we seem to be getting laxer on that front, so let’s learn about diarrhea?
But Japanese food? That seems like the most innocuous food ever. For me Mexican food does it, but Indian doesn’t even though it can be just as hot. A certain spice? I don’t know.
